


our ocean of butterflies

by triangularium



Category: Original Work
Genre: Artists, F/F, F/M, Introspection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-05
Updated: 2018-01-05
Packaged: 2019-02-28 13:51:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,457
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13272792
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/triangularium/pseuds/triangularium
Summary: A perpetually distracted, self-destructing artist struggles to find and replicate an elusive missing element in her paintings.





	our ocean of butterflies

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this one night as an experiment in unstructured, highly descriptive writing. Plot took a backseat to dreamy (hopefully?) stream of consciousness detail. Usually, I make it a point to understand exactly what message I was trying to convey by writing something, but in this case, I'm not sure. The ending is meant to be macabre and free to interpret. There are several points that aren't resolved. I don't necessarily agree with or condone the actions of some of the characters. They're just... there.
> 
> I started out with a sheet of paper, some music, and static scenes in my head -- places I wanted Skylar to visit. She was supposed to be a vehicle -- an explorer, a wanderer. Somewhere along the way, she turned into something else.

 

 

***

“So that’s how we live our lives. No matter how deep and fatal the loss, no matter how important the thing stolen from us -- that’s snatched right out of our hands -- even if we are left completely changed people with only the outer layer of skin from before, we continue to play out our lives this way, in silence.”

 _Sputnik Sweetheart_ (Haruki Murakami)

***

Not for the first time, the distinct spatter of rain across her bare skin wakes her up. Her left side is caked with mud and she blinks slowly, eyelashes brushing blades of grass. Then, she twists over onto her back with a wet squelch, shivering at the chill of the morning and the dampness of her clothes, especially the jeans -- clammy denim that clings to her legs uncomfortably. A smoky cinnamon exhale that condenses in arcs, diffusing into the petrichor that emanates from the ground, a contrasting warmth against her back. Toothpaste. Cleansing, minty, fresh.

Several feet away and above, nestled into a corner of the eaves, there is a spiderweb fluttering gently in the spring breeze. Two lonely drops slide along the edges, tiptoeing along sagging tightropes of silk. The spider itself is long gone, holed up in a tiny dark nook, those narrow spaces between rotting wooden planks with the paint peeling off. White into yellow, aged papery strips and slices of a decaying fruit. The second step of the porch creaks. A rocking chair with a threadbare shawl tossed carelessly across the back. The second floor window is wide open, the swaying flower-printed curtains dotted with water.

The sky -- a random, unpredictable pattern of shades of grey where clouds overlap, brighter where the coat of paint is thinner. There, a hint of sun that sends rays splashing through the gloom in golden sheets. Shiny, slick, yet dilapidated. Leafy vines crawl up the drain pipes -- burnt umber, grass green, lemon yellow. Lemons, lemons, lemons, lemons, lemons.

Something’s not right. An ominous subterranean hum before a jagged white streak, a flash of lightning cleaving the scene roughly in half.

Heaving, painful sobs slither up her throat, oily and cloyingly sweet and black. She tilts her forehead forward until it presses against the easel, closing her eyes.

It’s blessedly dark. Free of color. A wave of exhaustion washes over her, the palette slipping from numb fingertips but the echoing ricochet of wood against the linoleum is distant, separated by frosted shower glass.

The next morning finds her in a patch of watery sunlight, a dull ache shooting through her joints, her left cheek smeared with ochre. Yellow, brown, some shades of red exploding into threadlike strands in the sink, swirling down the drain.

An image, sharp and fleeting -- on the kitchen table, a half-full cup of orange juice.

***

“You can’t keep on going like this.”

Noah Weber. He sets the now-empty shot glass down on the counter, hard, ignoring the muted clink of protest. There are many kinds of glass, she remembers, and each warps its surroundings differently. Frosted -- soft shapes and shadows from the other side, lumpy matte peach. Rain -- bubble islands sliding down in parallel streams. Cylindrical surfaces, neon and lamplight glinting off the rim. At the other end of the bar, a scruffily dressed man is spinning coins in a row until they cascade down in a domino effect of clattering metal.

“Are you listening to me?” A steadying hand to her shoulder. She shrugs it off, flinching away reflexively.

“Why not?” She winces. Her tone is too high-pitched. Immature. Petulant.

“What?”

“I’m doing fine.”

“Wait.” He reaches slowly towards her face, near her right ear, giving her enough time to move away. His fingertips come away lavender, and in the strobe lights that flicker over intermittently, his eyes are a fathomless blue. “You need to take better care of yourself.”

“I just forgot to wash it off.” The amber liquid in the glass before her sloshes beckoningly as a particularly boisterous patron bangs his fist on the table, laughing drunkenly. She takes a sip, nervously tugging a wayward strand of hair.

“Are you ever going to show me what you paint?”

She sizes him up. Floppy brown hair, laugh lines, beige trenchcoat, wilting blue tie. An accountant or a secretary toiling away in a cubicle. A world in which everything can be quantified, where the most pertinent worries are tax forms, monthly rent, and performance reviews. A world of black and white.

She slept with him twice. Drunk out of her mind the first, morose and inconsolable. His arms were empty. Her mind was full. Too full. Enough to overflow and soak into him, that worn coat that promised picket fences and 2.5 children. Next to his cooling body afterwards thinking, that was okay. Just okay. No galaxies, very nearly boring, but it left her tired enough to sleep until pancakes at ten.

The second time -- just because she could. Because he looked at her like she was the only girl in the room. Acid green lipstick and paint under her nails like rainbow dust. She was poison.

“I’m going home.”

She stands abruptly, stool screeching back, fumbling for crumpled dollar bills in her wallet. They curl into themselves, edges folding away from the cool glow of the bottles in the display lining the walls. Copper, clear, citrus, champagne.

“Wait, Skylar, I can pay --!”

“It’s quite alright.” Outside in the frigid night air, window shoppers are scattered across the streets loosely, clumps of cherry blossoms interleaved with grass. The aroma of warm bread wafts from the bakery, distant singing. A baby crying.

“I don’t think I’ll be coming back.”

***

Back again. Face pressed against packed dirt, grainy circular indentations and a wisp of hair across her line of vision. Her nightgown, white and thin, blowing up her legs. She hasn’t shaved them in weeks, so it doesn’t tickle as much as she remembers -- twelve, young and coltish and knobby-kneed, scrambling around in search of perfect shells, darting to the edge of the beach as it receded only to stumble away when it showed signs of advancing. Races to draw pictures in the sand and collect hermit crabs that scuttled away under rocks at the slightest vibration.

She sits up, the wind dipping under her dress. Steep cliffs in the distance, seabirds swooping over the water to glimpse the silvery fin of a fish in its depths. Pieces of driftwood and tangled seaweed strewn across the shoreline, crevices of stagnant ocean infused with brine.

Waves are the hardest to paint. The right size of fan brush, pliant and whippy. Not one she’s left in the sink for too long or forgotten to clean since last month. The acrylic dyes the bristles in hard-to-remove turquoises and lime, depending on what she’s last used the brush for, and sometimes the incongruity between the now permanent color of the brush and her newly mixed palette is so jarring that she runs into a block, irrationally afraid that an unwanted yellow will somehow leach in and taint her art.

An abandoned lighthouse atop a bluff overlooking dangerously strong currents near a concentration of rocks. Reds and whites and greys. Forbidding, but not stormy. Clear blue skies have no personality. Fog in the distance, fading into the whitecaps. A round tip for the foam, light teal and aquamarine. She wants to pour glitter, forge jewelry.

Something’s missing. Something’s always missing.

The colors of her memories, however far away, are always brighter. Alive. Better than photographs and canvases, cheap snapshots of a single hovering moment, a corpse like memento of the past.

In the negative space, the wreckage of a mysterious ship, or a tugboat tied to a dock. Maybe a surfer braving the inclement weather, when a misstep could pull him into the trajectory of a fatal riptide.

No.

Her fingers twitch compulsively. The rainy farmhouse scene rests in strips on the other side of the studio, ensconced by a Jackson Pollock-style drape. Hidden humiliations.

She draws away from this failure, too, moving to cover it before she drops the sheet, inspired, and reaches for the sapphire. She squeezes a sizable lump next to the blues, dabbing and mixing and whitening. Hours pass. She sketches veins, lightly, and angel hair tentacles. Sparks of gold, a whisper of the trenches, the illusion of translucence. A stranded cerulean mass of beguiling softness and venom.

It’s... satisfactory. Surprising. Out of place. Her vision of beauty is discomfort -- to turn a familiar scene into something surreal with a few brushstrokes, a sleight of the hand, to create a building unease in encountering the distinctly otherworldly. True magic.

A growing lightheadedness interrupts. Her stomach growls, but the refrigerator is empty. Has been empty for the last few days, during which she’s been running on paint fumes and ginger ale.

The hunger pangs attack all at once with a vengeance, and she wonders how she was ever absent-minded enough to ignore them. Impulsively, she grabs her cream fleece jacket, locks the door behind her, and heads out into the cold, drafty hallway.

***

“There is a thin semantic line that separates weird and beautiful. And that line is covered in jellyfish.”

_Welcome to Night Vale_

***

Noah is, serendipitously, not at the club when she returns, drawn irresistibly back to the patchwork melange of glitzy string lights, mingling colognes and perfumes, brightly icy cocktails, and low murmurs -- the organized anti-choreography of casual flirting. She sits away from the center of the room anyway, nestled into an alcove conveniently out of sight, notebook in hand. She sucks up water greedily with a straw, ice clinking against the sides as she swirls the contents, creating artificial eddies and whirlpools. Sobering clarity in the realm of the unrestrained, the ignorant. She feels oddly powerful.

Lazy doodles that start as aimless circles near the spiral binding, rolling frictionlessly across blank pages. An older man occasionally raking his wrinkled fingers through his thinning part. He points up at the television screen animatedly, commenting about some football game, yelling directions and advice futilely at the pixelated images of the players. He talks too loudly, smiles too widely for his attitude to not be forced. His wife signed the divorce papers yesterday. Two years later, he’ll be homeless and penniless, cornered in an alley by two snarling dogs, a primal battle over a pilfered slice of steak. A spiral of endless rectangles. So it goes.

The rotund tattooed man glinting in the wan light. He always asks for rum and giggles the night away, dreaming of being surrounded by adoring women. He got his first piercing when he was fifteen, still plump with baby fat that refused to slide off his frame, entranced and starry-eyed as he was by the ad, the guarantee of perfection. Then more, over the years -- some in unlikely places -- only to look in the mirror and find himself wanting. A long line of lovers who left. The complex formations of detritus the careless can leave behind in the wasteland of a soul. Hexagonal prisms and the bittersweetness of jasmine on a moonlit night. So it goes.

“Hey there, gorgeous.” An angular figure encased in garish orange slides into the seat across from her and leans forward, the corner of her lips quirked up in a practiced smirk. The monstrosity of the slip should clash with the heroin chic makeup, but somehow, this girl manages to pull it off. “I’m Elise.”

Skylar stares. The interplay of light and shadow in the way Elise’s heart-shaped face is tilted is devastatingly appealing in a melancholic way. The almond-shaped eyes -- deep, reflective, the color of cornflowers. The high cheekbones, regal and proud and the shiny galactic eyeshadow, star remnants winding over the bridge of her nose. She is at a loss of how to start painting.

“Not much of a talker, I see.”

“Come home with me,” she says unthinkingly, and Elise starts, rearing back slightly.

“Hey, I don’t even know your name. Also, you haven’t bought me a drink!” A wink, a wandering hand sliding over her knee beneath the checkered tablecloth. If Skylar were slightly more drunk, she might have humored the game or even tried to play it.

“Skylar. I want eight hours.”

Seconds later, watching Chinese lanterns topped with snow glimmer dimly, candles burned down to the quick. Hurrying past apartment buildings and closed shops and frozen-over parks, quiet and unattended, past a homeless woman sleeping under a dead tree.

It’s been a while since she found something that necessitated her unused tube of slowly drying olive.

***

She detaches momentarily, hunting for the thermostat when it’s clear they can see their breaths -- blue frost plumes, strange and delightful 3D protrusions. By the time she returns, Elise has moved, standing surrounded by spots of paint and crumpled balls of paper, next to tape and a half-eaten banana coated with a thin layer of ice. She is surveying the jellyfish, borne up from the heart of the abyss.

“It’s wonderful,” she breathes, tracing the leftover beads of dried paint reverently, pressing a hand against a clouded window into a time left years behind.

“Now, you wouldn’t really know, would you?” Skylar responds, not unkindly.

Elise whirls around -- her skimpy, outrageous outfit of tangerine taffeta shedding a shower of multi colored sparkles, hair haloed by moonlight. The most silent blue. She is mildly offended but mostly amused.

“Rude. You don’t know me. What if I minored in art history? I didn’t; I only studied math, but I once took a class on symmetry.”

Skylar rubs her hands together, blowing into them weakly. Stiff, stinging knuckles. She shrugs.

“I dropped out of high school.”

The frayed leather of the couch in ripples and folds, exposed stuffing peeking out of the corners. Deflated.

Elise sniffles. She’s shaking minutely, the little hairs of her arms standing on end. If she stands still long enough, amongst the waste and beauty, the ice will work its way up hungrily in fractal patterns and swathes until she forgets to blink. A sculpture, an insect preserved in amber. In the great loneliness of its sap-filled bubble, as it struggled to escape from its solidifying tomb, what could it possibly have been looking at?

“Were you actually planning on just painting me?” she asks, genuinely puzzled.

“Was there something ambiguous about what I asked for?” Skylar frowns, standing up as well. She misses burning her tongue on hot chocolate and hiding in libraries on rainy days, rows and rows of bookshelves to explore. This room, a map she has grown familiar with, enough to skip the shaky diagonal tile at the entrance, all the broken and barely functioning parts from pacing frantically at 4 A.M.

“Well, I sort of assumed that was a euphemism for something else... right, well, you still have those hours.”

She walks up to a different rickety easel -- five years old from a shady auction. She’d also purchased a curious grandfather clock, its cuckoo damaged. The clock is now long gone, left behind somewhere months ago when she realized the expected hourly tolling was absent. Thick canvases, stained wallpaper, broken mirrors, and later a grandfather clock, trailing in her wake.

She flips to the next page.

***

They’re lying on the ground, divided by inches. They’re waiting for the paint to dry.

“You forgot my freckles,” Elise laughs shortly. Sure enough, the woman on the canvas is clear-skinned and unwrinkled, the hint of a smile in mid-flight across her face. Angelic, capturing none of her mischievous seductiveness, her smudged mascara, her sunken eyes. “It’s amazing how artists can fool themselves into seeing what they want to see.”

“I avoid painting people.”

“Why?”

“They’re hard to get right. A muscle in the wrong place or a smile that curves too much or little and they’ll look robotic. Grotesque. Monstrous. No room for error.”

“You’ll add them in later, right?” Desperately, now, the hollow, sad porcelain features that made her imagine a certain kind of dying. “It’s pretty, but it doesn’t really look like me.”

“Of course.”

Thirty minutes later, before she falls into a fitful sleep, she does, flecks of midnight and magenta over brown, like pulling shooting star sequins off the sky.

***

Skylar props herself up on her elbows and slides several hundred dollar bills onto the coffee table, illuminated from behind by the lukewarm winter sunrise. Elise gazes unblinkingly at the ceiling and its exposed beams.

“This has got to be the weirdest night I’ve ever had, and I’m not even high. How do you have the money to pay me?”

“Odd jobs.” And a dwindling trust fund, autumn leaves spinning, falling at five centimeters per second.

“All I did was stand here and look at paintings,” Elise muses. “Not what I’m used to, but it was nice. Young again for a while, like slurping up Mom’s ravioli. You don’t have to pay the full price.”

Skylar leans in, kisses her. A momentary collision of chapped lips. She drifts away just as quickly, wiping her mouth on the back of her hand. Fluorescent gloss. It looks like it could glow in the dark.

“What -- why did you do that?”

“I’ve never kissed someone before. I wanted to know how it felt like.”

“So... what did you think?” Their palms -- warm, solid paperweights over flyaway draft sheets.

A lot of things, some painful, all indefinable. “It was okay.”

“Just okay?”

Skylar turns away, straight into a blob of blue ruin.

***

She wakes up alone in a world of hurt, peeling her battered, aching body from the floor. Some stringy painted hair falling into her eyes. She needs to take a shower.

Shuffling out the door and into the passageway, clutching a bathrobe. The heater’s malfunctioning again. She deliberately doesn’t consider what this might mean for the water.

Suddenly, a spike of pain lancing up her spine, radiating outward to her extremities. Her toes merely tingle warningly, as though they are about to fall asleep. She hadn’t been sleeping in a contorted position last night, but, she wonders blankly, perhaps her lacking self-care habits over the years have caught up to her. She leans heavily against the wall, breath hissing out, and tries not to whimper. Long, slow exhales.

A pressure behind her eyes. She trips blindly into the bathroom, hyperventilating.

The lightbulb swinging, flickering. From the frequency, it will go out in a day, maybe two. Cracks in the ceiling, inexplicable wet patches. The sink and its buildup of mold, the mirror on the wall above. She punched it once, a spidering lattice of cracks at face level. She doesn’t remember why.

The water is cool, relieving. She’s burning up. Coming down with a fever. Her stomach, her ears, and then her upper arms. Unimaginable heat without a source.

Something liquid forcing its way out of her tear ducts, and she can’t stop crying. Her skin sizzles, from pale to a burned pink, smoking. She chokes, hacking up something bloody that slides down the drain and spatters over the mirror. A tooth clatters down the pipes.

She braces herself against the wall, sliding down, a fallen marionette. Too drained of energy to scream. A pitiful half-stifled cry erupts from her throat, then a series of frightened gasps.

She promises impossibilities, swears under her breath, hits the mirror until the shattered shards lie in piles of glass dust. Dandelion seeds adrift, away on high-risk adventures. It’s no good. She keeps coughing, phlegm and blood, and feels something rip inside, slide smoothly into her arms.

She glances down at the beating, trembling heart in her palm, sluggishly oozing over her fingers -- red, bruised -- and nearly drops it onto the marble tiles. Shakily, she holds it, presses her ear to the pulsing capillaries and shuts her eyes. Then, she hears it.

It’s no song she’s ever heard before. If she listens carefully, she can make out a wolf’s howl, waves crashing against the sand, children caroling in the middle of a road, the rumbling of a passing train, and the shrill resonance of a tuning fork all at once. A haunting cacophony.

Melting snow leaks through the crumbling roof.

The world ends in neither fire nor ice, but music.

***

The past is dead.

She presses a clean brush to paper and dreams of things she has never seen. A blue airport, a cloud city. An orange sunset in the Parthenon, framed by pillars. Barefoot and carrying a ratty teddy bear, walking along a desert road past twilight. Power lines. City lights in the basin of a dormant volcano.

Deep in her chest cavity, the staccato drumbeat. She smiles to herself and takes the first step down a winding road that doesn’t end.

***

“The artist is the phoenix who burns to emerge.”

 _White Oleander_ (Janet Fitch)

**Author's Note:**

> Well... that was fun. Let me know what you think / any questions you have? Congrats on making it to the bottom! :P


End file.
